In a bid to consolidate support among evangelicals and keep his momentum from ebbing, Trump is courting charismatic televangelists who believe God wants you to be rich.

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Still winning with evangelical voters but unpopular with their leaders, his campaign has begun training its outreach efforts on media-friendly pastors and advocates of the prosperity gospel — including a Jews for Jesus preacher with a television show and a Christian broadcasting executive known for her taste in oversized pink wigs — who are less turned off by his brash style and history of socially liberal positions. And that’s critical if he intends to keep Ben Carson’s strength with evangelicals from growing.

“They’re very comfortable with big personalities and TV personalities,” said Gary Marx, a former executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, of so-called “charismatic” evangelicals and televangelists. “If he’s going to build a bridge into the faith-based community, that’s really the best way for him to start. It’s not going to be with the high-minded Presbyterians and Episcopalians.”

This week, the differences in reception were clear.

Before he spoke at the Values Voter Summit in Washington on Friday, Trump asked around the green room how other candidates had fared and what had been their biggest applause lines. He took notes. Then he went onstage, got booed for dissing Marco Rubio and came in fifth in the presidential straw poll of evangelical activists.

On Monday, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, he had more luck. At a gathering dominated by preachers of the prosperity gospel and media-savvy faith leaders, televangelist Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, and Jews for Jesus evangelist Kirt Schneider challenged Trump on his habit of personally attacking rivals and critics.

After some back and forth, Cleveland Pentecostal pastor Darrell Scott got up and defended Trump, saying, “To be quite honest, if you tone it down too much, you won’t be you.” Many in the room applauded.

“You do need to refrain somewhat from calling someone a moron or something, but you can’t turn into a milquetoast neither for the sake of winning a vote,” Scott, whose church owns its own radio station and who first met Trump at a similar meeting four years ago, told POLITICO.

Roughly three dozen leaders attended the 2½-hour meeting at Trump Tower, including televangelists Gloria and Kenneth Copeland and Trinity Broadcasting Network co-founder Jan Crouch, who is also the president of a Christian theme park in Orlando.

As it came to an end, televangelist Paula White said Trump wanted them to pray for him. Trump nodded, and the faith leaders laid hands on him and prayed.

Many evangelical leaders look askance at the crowd the businessman is courting. “The people that Trump has so far identified as his evangelical outreach are mostly prosperity gospel types, which are considered by mainstream evangelicals to be heretics,” said outspoken Trump critic Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination at 16 million members.

“Trump seems to be positioning himself as a secular version of the health-and-wealth televangelists. … What Donald Trump is doing in terms of promises for the future is very similar to what’s going on among these prosperity gospel hawkers.”

Scott said that he rejects an extreme version of the prosperity gospel but that he and others at the meeting identify with a moderate version of it.

But Moore is not alone among evangelical leaders in his disapproval of Trump — on account of his personal life, lack of obvious piety and past record of pro-choice and other liberal social positions. In a survey of them released last week by World Magazine, he garnered just 1 percent support, while Rubio led with 37 percent support.

But among all evangelical Republican voters, Trump is still ahead, winning 25 percent of their support in a recent Quinnipiac poll. In the same poll, Carson has pulled in right behind Trump and within the margin of error at 24 percent support among evangelicals.

Craig Brown, a Trump supporter and employee of Ohio Christian University who met the businessman at Friday’s Values Voter Summit, praised him for his “straightforward” style. He said many evangelical leaders disapprove of Trump only because “political correctness had made tremendous inroads into facets of our society and culture.”

Trump is winning the “sick and tired of it” bloc of evangelicals, according to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s chief political correspondent, David Brody, who has interviewed Trump twice in the past two weeks and said he has slimmer prospects with “solutions-oriented” and “wear-it-on-my-sleeve” evangelicals.

“Evangelicals have felt used and been burned before,” said Brody, who first reported on several details of the Monday meeting. “Along comes Donald Trump, and he is a breath of fresh air for them.”

Scott, along with Los Angeles-based Bishop Clarence McClendon, who broadcasts his weekly sermons and has appeared on MTV, and South Carolina-based pastor Mark Burns, CEO of the NOW Television Network, challenged Trump to engage more fully with black voters. Trump agreed to work harder at it and gave Scott permission to arrange a meeting between Trump and black pastors during a planned Oct. 10 visit to Atlanta.

Scott said the campaign was receptive to his desire to arrange similar meetings around the country. On Friday, Trump will hold a rally at a megachurch in Virginia Beach.